The present invention relates to system maintenance and diagnosis, and more particularly to techniques for registering information for diagnostic data dumping in a monitored system.
When a system encounters a failure or error, diagnostic data is typically collected and stored to a disk for diagnostic analysis. The diagnostic data may be communicated to a diagnosis site for analysis and resolution of the error. The amount of diagnostic data that is captured varies from one system to another. Using one conventional approach, all of the data associated with the system is gathered and stored to the persistent memory (e.g., a disk) for diagnostic purposes. The stored data is then communicated to a diagnosis site for analysis. Such an approach of complete diagnostic data gathering however consumes a lot of time and valuable system resources. Further, the amount of data that is collected may include thousands of files and many gigabytes of data. Sending such a large volume of data to the diagnosis site is cumbersome, time-consuming, and expensive. Further, if the data received at a diagnosis site is very large, it takes the vendor a long time to analyze the received diagnostic data to identify relevant pieces of data for analyzing a particular problem.
Alternatively, only a basic set of diagnostic data associated with the system is collected and stored during an initial diagnostic process. The diagnostic data gathered by the initial diagnostic process is then analyzed, usually manually, to determine what additional diagnostic processes have to be run to capture additional data that is more relevant to the specific failure and essential for error resolution. This iterative process continues until someone manually determines that sufficient data has been gathered to solve the problem. The second approach thus requires diagnostic data gathering to be performed over multiple stages. At the end of each stage, a manual determination has to be made if sufficient diagnostic data has been gathered. This process is very time-consuming and also very error-prone due to its manual component.
Accordingly, under either scenario, developers at the vendor's diagnosis site cannot locate relevant diagnostic information in a timely manner. As a result, the time needed to resolve the issue or problem is increased, leading to customer dissatisfaction.